Having used emacs for many years, OP's description of "doing things wrong" is exactly the way I use emacs.

I seldom care about the inner workings of emacs and will do the absolute minimum to get it to work the way I want and then move on. I'm reminded over and over again that Emacs patinas really nicely with poorly written elisp in an init file over time.

Case in point, I found that org-export is super slow. After profiling it, I found the slow function, copied it, removed the slow part, and advice-add it right back in there[0]. Might this break some other deeply intertwined behavior someplace else? Probably. Does it matter if I'm the only one using it? Nope.

[0]https://github.com/alexkehayias/emacs.d/blob/master/init.el#...